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90% of my job is...

David J Eddy on December 07, 2018

To many jobsdescriptions are over complicated just to sound fancy. Let's have a little fun here. Explain in the shortest and simplest way possible what 90% of your day to day job is. I'll start:

Directing people to read the documentation.

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buphmin

Looking at the requirements of a project, then looking at the code, then... (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

In all seriousness though its taking requirements and implementing them. Sometimes its in very old bad code, some ok code, and sometimes some really good code. The hard part is understanding the big picture when there are thousands of tables, separate systems that need to talk to each other and with almost none of it documented.

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Anna Simoroshka

THIS. Exactly my job real description.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Fiddling...

I’m always fiddling with something. Code, design, copy, whatever. I’m a fiddler.

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Juan F Gonzalez

I'm assuming you use this site a lot then jsfiddle.net :'D

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Peter Ellis

Knowing and telling everyone what everyone else is doing.

Okay, I do a lot of translating between coder-speak and human too, and help everyone with everything, both coding-related and other stuff. Keeps everyone happy if they only have to concentrate on their own job. And happy means efficient.

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Phil Ashby

This, pretty much, plus a bit of talking about security stuff so we can all be equally paranoid, and have less 'bloody infosec'/'bloody idiots' in relationships!

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Elliot Derhay • Edited

#ParanoiaEquality

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Vincent Milum Jr

"How do I print?"

uuuhhhggggg, not again!?

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Elliot Derhay

I get called about the copier pretty frequently too, though mostly by the same person -- and usually when convenience is low.

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Vincent Milum Jr

One of my favorites is those that try to fax. They type in the phone number, put in the paper... But then never hit "start fax", and get confused when it doesn't work.

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Elliot Derhay

I can't say I've seen that where I work. So far, everyone I've worked with here at least knows there's an extra step to send.

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Gregor Gonzalez

I know that feel bro 👊

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Avery

Communicating: teaching, learning, planning, aligning, reporting etc. 80% out loud, 20% written. Notably, not a ton of documentation.

Even when I'm hands on keyboard writing code it's still paired programming.

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Ondrej

Honestly 90 % of my job is refactoring legacy code to the point in which it is usable & wondering if my client will pay me for it.

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David J Eddy

"fixing the prev. persons leftovers"

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Ondrej

This.

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Alexandru Bucur

Making things work, be it code, managing people, new hires, hardware issues and so on. There's no dull day from that point of view, there's always a 'fire' to extinguish somewhere.

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Reese Poirier

90% of my job is keeping the lights on.

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Michiel Hendriks

Avoiding meetings.

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Gabriel Magalhães dos Santos

In job test: make a funcionar to calculate Fibonacci and draw the LINE with canvas/react/graphql/gulp

In job day: padding-top: 30px;

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Daniel Uhlmann

Review server-sided architecture - cry a bit about non-automated things - automate it - straightening it on each node - smile.

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Robin Kretzschmar

... thinking about whether you really need to implement it and if so, whether there is a better solution.

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Helen Anderson

Asking "but what are you trying to achieve?"

Most of the requests that come my way say "I need this dataset, please provide it".

90% of the time there is a better dataset the analyst isn't aware of or some aggregating that I can do upstream that will get rid of a lot of the heavy lifting the analyst has signed themselves up for.

It's a nice feeling to be able to add value and not just be a 'data donkey', but I find myself asking "but what are you trying to achieve?" over and over and over.

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

Android development: write Kotlin code that fetches data from internet, display it in a list, and open a detailed view when you click on an item.

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Plamena Radneva

Figuring out actual acceptance criteria (since requirements are often too vague) by asking TPMs, architects, discussing AC of dependant teams, etc.

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Michael "notriddle" Howell • Edited

Rationalizing the regulatory and process requirements into PHP and SQL.

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Elliot Derhay

"Rationalizing". Good word choice.

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Keith Lee

Busywork while $ dd if=linux-yocto-arm-console.img of=/dev/sdc bs=4M does its thing....

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K

Luckily: Writing

Mostly code.

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Jack Harner 🚀

90% of my job is figuring out how to market a Zappos-sized catalogue with the budget of a Mom and Pop shoe store.

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David J Eddy

Nothing like being asked to do the impossible. :)

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Adrian B.G.

Improve the sales of our in-game shops.

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Gregor Gonzalez

I really feel uncomfortable when I'm not coding and people doesn't help. 70% of my job is to assist unproductive meetings.

the rest: "hi, can you configure email account on my cell phone?"

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Vikas Rana

Playing email email ...